Saudi PIF Reportedly Weighs Merging EA Into Savvy Games, Just a Month After the $55B Buyout

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, which took EA private in August, is reportedly weighing folding the publisher into Savvy Games Group, uniting Battlefield, The Sims and Apex Legends with Pokémon GO and Monopoly GO under one roof.

The dust had barely settled on EA's blockbuster buyout, and the people now in charge are already talking about shaking things up again. According to a Bloomberg report published on September 10, executives at Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) are internally discussing whether to merge Electronic Arts with Savvy Games Group, another company the fund controls.

Quick recap for anyone who missed it: PIF closed its roughly $55 billion acquisition of EA on August 5, alongside Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, taking the publisher private. The idea now, per Bloomberg's sources, is to have a single Saudi vehicle handling acquisitions, game development and IP exploitation across the industry, rather than running EA and Savvy as separate operations.

The scale here is hard to ignore. On one side sits EA's catalog, with EA Sports FC, Battlefield, The Sims and Apex Legends. On the other, Savvy Games Group owns Scopely, the studio behind mobile hits like Monopoly GO and Pokémon GO. Combining them would create one of the biggest gaming operators on the planet, with a strong footing in both console/PC and mobile, which is where the real money moves these days.

It's not happening tomorrow, though. The report makes clear no final decision has been made, and the merger is unlikely to move forward before Savvy closes its own $6 billion acquisition of Moonton, the Chinese mobile developer. Both EA and PIF declined to comment when asked, which is about standard for a deal still at this early, speculative stage.

There's also the regulatory angle: a combination of this size would almost certainly draw antitrust scrutiny in multiple markets, in a process that could echo the long fight Microsoft went through to close its Activision Blizzard acquisition. And that's not the only worry. The EA buyout already loaded the company with $20 billion in added debt, and rumors of cost cuts and studio closures were circulating well before this merger talk surfaced.

For anyone playing FC, Battlefield or a Scopely title right now, none of this changes much in the short term. But the move says a lot about a strange moment in the industry, where Saudi money buys a giant publisher, loads it with debt, and then starts floating a full reorganization just months later. What stands out about the timing is how it undercuts the whole 'stability' pitch that usually comes with taking a company private, and historically it's the workers, not the fund's owners, who end up absorbing that kind of restructuring.